Nicholas Sylvain writes:
>However, I have run into a problem. I was going through the craft
>descriptions in the Imperial Encyclopedia, and was idly punching some
>numbers to figure out jump ability and power plant fuel consumption.
>I received a rude shock when the numbers didn't add up. Please let me
>know if I am doing something wrong, so I can rest easy at night. :-)
>For example, let's look at the give TL15 Scout/Courier design.
>864 Mw / 6.0 MW per KL of power plant = 144 Kl of pp.
The reason your numbers don't match is that they do not take into
account economies of scale (Ref guide - same page as power plants)
For a power plant of size 14+, output is tripled. For working backward,
any ship that has a power output of 252 Mw or more, has 1 kl of
plant per 18 Mw of plant, instead of 1 for 6 Mw.
This makes the power plant fuel for the scout as:
864 Mw / 18 = 48 kl of plant * 0.009 = 0.432 kl fuel/hour
0.432 * 24 * 30 = 311.04 kl of pp fuel.
Now the Jump drive fuel is 5x the jump drive volume,
or (5 + 5 * Jump number)% of the total ship volume. For a scout,
this is 15% * 1350 kl = 202.5 kl of jump fuel. (Note that this is a
change from classic Traveller).
202.5 + 311.04 = 513.54 round to 514 kl. The book lists 515 kl,
so they probably rounded seperately.
>For fun, let's try the TL15 Fighter design.
>186/6.0 = 31
>31 * 0.009 = 0.279
>0.279 * 24 * 5 = 33.48 KL fuel
>Listed fuel size is 33.6 Kl. Close enough.
Whoever designed the fighter also forgot economies of
scale for the power plant, so you aren't the only one...:-)
The fighter design in the book is bogus for several reasons.
The big one is that with the rules as given, it is impossible to get a
TL 15 power plant with a 186 Mw output! For plants from 10 to 14 kl,
the output is 12 Mw per kl, so the largest output plant at that level
produces just under 168 Mw, then it jumps to 252 when you hit 14 kl.
The easiest way to fix the fighter is to give it a power plant of 14 kl,
producing 252 Mw, and it just has some spare power for Agility. The
masses given for the fighter are a misprint (the figures listed are for the
enclosed air-raft), so you will have to work out the mass. I don't have my
figures handy, but I could post my version later if you want.
This ignores the issue of whether the amount of fuel used is
reasonable for what we know about fusion....(rant!...rave!..sorry :-)
I have found the number of errors in the book vehicles to be
rather disturbing, especially since working through the designs is
usually the only way to catch them. If there is interest, I could post
worked over versions of the more common book ships, with notes
on power consumption, etc. similar to the the list of updated ships
that Bertil Jonell posted several months ago. Let me know if there
is interest, I don't want to take up bandwidth unnecessarily.
W. Dow Rieder
alias Capt. Kagariilian Grant
When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems
start to look like nails...
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